Editorial Note

There's some work to be done!
Thus, Sat-ND will most probably not be published on a daily
basis before Mid-August. In fact, it's quite likely that there will
be outages over a span of a week or so. Please accept my apologies
for this interruption of service.

LAUNCHES

Not
Supercow but Superbird

Superbird-C, the third
communications and television satellite for Space Communications
Corporation (SCC) of Tokyo, is scheduled for launch Friday night.

The satellite, which was
built by Hughes Space and Communications Company in El Segundo,
Calif., has a scheduled launch window of 8:54 to 9:34 p.m. EDT
Friday July 25 (5:54 p.m. PDT, 12:54 a.m. Saturday July 26, GMT, and
9:54 a.m. Saturday in Tokyo). Superbird-C will be launched onboard
an Atlas IIAS launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Station.

SCC is the owner and operator
of Superbird-C, an HS 601 body-stabilized spacecraft model. The
payload consists of 24 active Ku-band transponders powered by
90-watt, linearised travelling wave tube amplifiers. The satellite
has a pair of four-panel solar arrays that will generate 4,500 watts
of electrical power. The spacecraft will also have two
216-cm-diameter antennas using Hughes' innovative shaped beam
technology, in addition to a steerable spot beam designed and built
by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. of Tokyo to increase service where
needed.

Superbird-C is the first in
the series built by Hughes, but is the third satellite in the SCC
fleet. It will join Superbird-A and Superbird-B to provide digital
multi-channel broadcasting services and business communications
services throughout Japan and the Asia-Pacific region, including
Hawaii.

Superbird-C will be stationed
at 144 degrees East longitude, and will have a service life of more
than 10 years.

SATELLITES

Iridium:
one less

Iridium said in a press
release it was informed by Motorola that it has lost communications
with one of its recently launched IRIDIUM satellites.

The satellite, one of five
launched July 9, 1997, was in a parking orbit awaiting its ascent to
final mission orbit. If communication isn't established within 120
days, the satellite is programmed to lose power and will be
destroyed as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. The other 16
satellites orbiting the Earth continue to function within normal
parameters. [By the way, one out of 17 is a failure rate of almost
six percent.]

Iridium LLC was advised by
Motorola that should loss of the satellite be confirmed, Iridium LLC
will not bear the financial risk of loss, nor will it impact the
scheduled date for commercial service in September 1998.

Iridium LLC is a Motorola
Inc.-backed consortium that plans a US$5-billion, 66-satellite
global communication service. Five more satellites are to be
launched next month.

M2A gets
ground segment

PT MultiMedia Asia has
selected a consortium led by Alcatel to supply the ground segment
for its MultiMedia Asia (M2A) satellite communications system.

The consortium includes
Alcatel, Titan Information Systems (an American satellite equipment
manufacturer) and Thomson MultiMedia (a French consumer electronics
company). As part of a contract worth US$105 million for the initial
phase of the system, the consortium will take responsibility for the
entire ground segment of M2A.

M2A is a satellite based
telecommunications network which will provide multi-media digital
telecommunications services into small fixed antennas directly to
end-users in Asia. The M2A satellite, to be manufactured by Space
Systems/Loral and Alcatel, is scheduled for launch in early 1999.
The target price for a reception terminal is US$650.

In its initial phase, the M2A
network will provide services to some 400,000 subscribers in
Indonesia. After the initial service roll-out, additional gateway
earth stations will be added to provide services to some four
million subscribers all over Asia in the final configuration. The
system's coverage area includes Indonesia and the rest of ASEAN,
Australia, India, China, Korea and Japan.

CHANNELS

Porn
Channels I: Arabsat kicks off CFI

Arabsat said on Sunday it had
stopped its transmissions of Canal France Internationale (CFI,)
saying the channel had aired a "pornographic" film and
violated Islamic decency standards despite frequent warnings.

Arabsat, which operates
satellite communications for Arab countries including television,
telephone and data transmission, is jointly owned by 21 Arab states.
The satellite organisation is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The
movie broadcast by Canal France Internationale on Saturday afternoon
"went over the limits, and we will seek to cancel our contract
with them," ArabSat said in a statement carried by the official
Saudi Press Agency.

An Arabsat spokesman told
Reuters that "as of today [Sunday] we consider the contract
between Arabsat and Canal France International (CFI) finished. [...]
They transmitted a pornographic film, and it was not the first
time." The French channel reportedly said it had intended to
broadcast the movie on another satellite.

CFI is a selection of
programmes from France's public broadcasters which is (was?)
broadcast all over the world.

Porn
Channels II: Canadian satellite kicks off kids show

What's going on in the
geosynchronous orbit? According to news reports, a Canadian
satellite interrupted a kiddie show on WKBD-TV, Detroit, with about
24 seconds from an X-rated movie last Thursday.

The mix-up reportedly
occurred somewhere in space as a satellite beamed the cartoon
"Bobby's World" to stations including WKBD-TV, and the
Canadian company Fifth Dimension transmitted a porn program to its
clients. "We're horrified," said Michelle Hunt,
vice-president of media relations for Paramount, which owns WKBD.
"We obviously deeply regret this occurrence, and are taking
appropriate measures to ensure it never happens again."

Well, how can they if it was
an evil Canadian satellite that beamed obscene programming directly
into U.S. homes (shudder)? There are lots of reports on this
incidence, but unfortunately no technical details. However, it's
very likely that the mix-up occurred back here on Earth and not in
space.

As the term "geostationary
satellite" indicates, those knickknacks are stationary relative
to the Earth, so it's much more likely that the error occurred
either at an uplink or a reception site. These things have
happened before, actually. Bored operators who just wanted some,
say, diversion during their hard work. Getting increasingly
diverted, they pressed the wrong button -- et voilà, the porn
channel went out to the public audience.

Sky Five
Text to provide C5 teletext

Britain's Independent
Television Commission- issued a license to provide a teletext
service on Channel 5 to Sky Five Text, a joint venture between
British Sky Broadcasting and Channel 5.

The 10-year license was bid
for £1.5 million pounds. The ITC said it expected the service
will commence no later than June 30 of next year -- obviously, a
very generous deadline. Nobody needs almost a year to set up a
teletext service.

DIGITAL

Cancom:
Idiots to distribute U.S. TV in Canada?

Canadian Satellite
Communications Inc. (Cancom) expects any new competitors to follow
rules that benefit the entire broadcasting system -- not just skim
off easy business, said Paul Racine, Cancom's vice-president of
regulatory, corporate and native affairs.

Cancom currently is the only
wholesale signal distributor licensed in Canada. The Canadian
Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said
earlier this week it will hold a hearing next February to consider
the renewal of Cancom's licence as a satellite distributor of cable
signals to about 2,500 cable companies, indicating it will also
consider applications from others wishing to compete with Cancom.
Canada's two fledgling direct-to-home (DTH) satellite television
companies, StarChoice and ExpressVu, are among those expected to
take up with Cancom.

"We're ready to face up
to competition," said Racine. "But there must be more to
competition than a mad rush by cream-skimming groups to distribute
more American signals in Canada." He said competitors must be
required to distribute more Canadian than foreign signals. "It's
not enough to just distribute American signals, any idiot can do
that [...] you must also use some of the revenues you derive from
distributing American signals to distribute Canadian signals."
Racine also opposes the entry of DTH companies to cable markets:
"You can not be cable's worst competitor and cable's best
friend." Incidentally, Cancom and its 54-percent owner Western
International Communications Inc. hold a 10-percent stake in
ExpressVu.

Cancom is more or less an
invention of the Canadian government -- at least, it inspired the
creation of the company 15 years ago when it wanted to ensure remote
Canadian communities got access to television signals.

ONLINE

Zheng:
Letter from the funny farm

Okay, it's summertime. There
hardly are any interesting news. So I phoned Grandpa Zheng,
who fortunately is still detained in a lunatic asylum, begging him
to send me some Internet news. Too bad -- he did.

First of all, he wrote that
Britain's Queen Elizabeth loves to surf the Internet and has become
an ambitious fan of the information superhighway. He claims he read
that in the Sunday Times.

Coached by her husband, the
Duke of Edinburgh, the 71-year-old has become a devotee of
cyberspace and reportedly even likes to address her subjects by
email! The paper said that Queen Elizabeth, who oversaw her own
site's design, scans its public message book with growing
fascination. The monarch reportedly is now thought to use the
Internet to exchange information on current affairs with highly
placed confidantes around Britain and the Commonwealth states.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/

(It was quite an effort to
research the URL, according to Zheng: "Just remember that less
than a year before the site was set up last February, Reuters
reported that gullible Britons woke up on April 1, 1996 to hear that
Queen Elizabeth had set up a web site on the Internet. Ha, ha --
April Fools Day! Back then, the Guardian claimed the queen's
cyberspace debut included an interactive tour of Buckingham Palace
and a quiz about the royal family. So, does reality match that joke?
Find out yourself.")

And then there were the
Microsoft pigs.

The software giant has
created a SwineOnline Web site in conjunction with Microsoft's Site
Builders Network State Fair, an online event that was launched last
Friday. (You don't have to be a member to access the site.) Get
ready for some heavy Active-Xing (if you dare >:-) and other
state-of-the-art technology . Yes, sometimes you even need Microsoft
Internet Explorer 4.0 Preview II -- for instance, to subscribe to
PigTV.

Too bad! Zheng hasn't managed
to install that software yet. It just won't work on his PC. Thus, he
has to keep on watching "Cow & Chicken" on Cartoon
Network because at least pork butts appear there frequently, he
remarks.

The SwineOnline thing,
however, is about raising and caring for a piglet by feeding and
grooming it regularly (almost like that latest Japanese Tamu...
Tamagui... Tamaguchi[?] craze, wellyaknowwhaddimeananywaydoya) But
here, you can even win Microsoft prize packages at the end of a
five-day competition!